In Las Vegas this morning, I sat down for a half-hour or so with Apple's Director, Pro Video Product Management, Richard Townhill, hoping to clear up a few details about Final Cut Studio 2, which was released yesterday to an enthusiastic crowd.

Before I get to our conversation, however, a word or two on Apple's participation at NAB: It's huge - noticeably bigger than any prior Apple presence at this high-end broadcaster's' gathering. How big? Well, if you've ever been to or seen photos of Apple's booth at the San Francisco Macworld Expo each January, it's the same booth. We're talking big; we're talking big investment; we're talking big commitment to professional video.

(For more information about the entirety of Final Cut Studio 2, check out our report from Monday morning, and also Tuesday's podcast, in which I contribute a detailed report from the Las Vegas announcement.

1. Motion 3: A Leopard preview? My first question to Townhill was about the animation improvements and 3D enhancements in Motion 3. As we all now know, Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard, is scheduled to ship in October; it's scheduled to include a new built-in animation engine called, imaginatively enough, Core Animation. I asked Townhill if any of Motion's new animation enhancements were based on Leopard's upcoming Core Animation engine. His response was that Motion does not, in fact, rely on Core Animation, and that the demos that wowed the crowd at yesterday's were performed with all apps running on Mac OS 10.4.9. When I asked him if there will be any improvements to Motion 3 when Leopard does ship, all I got in return was a smile and the obligatory "Apple doesn't comment on unreleased products." I knew the drill, but I had to ask.

2. Compressor 3: Better-than-real-time encoding. Yesterday's announcement included an impressive report by Townhill of a head-to head between Compressor 3 and its immediate ancestor, Compressor 2. The results Townhill displayed were for a test in which both apps, running on an eight-core-core Mac Pro, converted a 10-minute HD video clip into an H.264 MPEG-4 iPod video. Using Compressor 2, the Mac Pro took 16 minutes and 45 seconds. Not too bad, but nothing to shout about. When running Compressor 3, however, it took a mere six minutes and two seconds - impressive performance; faster, in fact, than real time. Townhill assured me that Compressor 3's mastery of 8-core threading was the difference.

3. Compressor 3: Providing assistance to third-party plug-ins. According to Townhill, Compressor 3 is optimized to use all eight cores in the Mac Pro - but if you don't want it to, you can dial it back in a System Preferences pane. When I asked Townhilll if this "dialable core-usage" was limited to Compressor, he told me that, yes, it was, but that all of the other apps in the suite were tuned to "get the maximum use out of the system." He then went on to tell me something that hadn't been hinted at in yesterday's announcement: That Compressor is able to take third-party codecs and distribute their workload over the eight cores without the third-party codec having to do anything to request such help. In essence, Apple is helping third-party software to run better than it's designed to run.

More...

4. Final Cut Pro 6: The provenance of ProRes 422. Apple introduced what it's calling a "new post-production format offering uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes" called ProRes 422 (or, at times 4:2:2 - but I digress), and it's capable of providing truly gorgeous output in truly highly compressed file sizes. In response to my questions, Townhill said that, yes, it was developed by Apple, but since it's a QuickTime codec it's freely available - and if third-party developers want to license it, Apple's all ears. For example, AJA Video Systems licensed ProRes 422 to put into silicon as the heart and soul of it's new HD I/O system named - take a wild guess? - the IO HD. So ProRes 422 is software that can be housed in silicon for snappy performance. Simple.

5. Final Cut Pro 6: Motion integration. Apple announced yesterday that templates created in Motion 3 would be accessible from directly within Final Cut Pro 6, but it didn't make it clear exactly how. According to Townhill, the answer is simplicity itself. When you launch Final Cut Pro for the first time, you're provided with a setup option that asks whether you'd like Final Cut Pro to display a Motion Templates menu option. If you tell Final Cut Pro that you'd like that addition, it'll display Motion's templates, including a QuickTime preview of each. If and when you create your own Motion templates, you'll be able to access them from Final Cut Pro, as well.

6. Motion 3: More details. You can now apply Motion's Behaviors to the new vector-based paint strokes simply by slipping and sliding them in the timeline - no keyframes, no cry. Townhill could give me no hard and fast number of multiple cameras and light sources that you can have, because you will, of course, be constrained by the horsepower and hard-drive bandwidth of your system. The slick new Audio Behaviors capability, in which your soundtrack controls an animation, is triggered by a combination of the soundtrack's frequency and amplitude, which Audio Behaviors can interpret rhythmically - what's more, when tuning an Audio Behavior, you can choose the frequency spectrum to which you want the animation to respond. Killer flexibility.

7. Compressor 3: Batchability. Okay, so "batchability" isn't a word. So sue me - but after hearing Townhill give me a quick rundown on all the batch-processing and job-chaining options built into Compressor 3, batchability might just make it past the watchdogs of the MLA. You can essentially set up a broad range of different jobs, job types, and job sequences, assign them to different cores, and also chain jobs so that processes that would be required for each iteration of an output file will be performed first. For example, let's say you're outputting your file to six different types of encoding, but you want to speed up or slow down a portion of a clip; with job-chaining, you merely use a simple chain icon to link together all the jobs' sequences so that the speeding/slowing effects happen first, before Compressor splits the project up into multiple encoding jobs.

More...

8. Color: Terminology. I needed a little help from Townhill with some terminology used in the newest member of the Final Cut Suite, Color. As you probably know from digging around on the Apple website and elsewhere, Color includes a slick 3D representation of the color information in the clip you're examining. The two-dimensional plane of the ring bounding this scope is the RGB chroma - color information - of the clip. The third dimension of the scope is what's called luma; simply put, luma is the measure of a color's intensity in the range from dark to light. These terms I already knew, but one from a slide at yesterday's announcement puzzled me. The slide said that using Color you could "Adjust lift, gamma, and gain." What the %$#@! is "lift?" Townhill thought he knew, but decided it'd be best to check with someone he knew knew. A phone call later: Lift refers to raising the luma of all the colors in a set - of a frame or clip, for example. (Townhill, by the way, had been right.) Simple, eh? Eh…?

9. Color: Looks. A few quick notes about "looks," those user-definable, saveable collections of color corrections that can be easily used to define and repeat the ... well ... the look of a piece of video. Color comes with over 20 built-in looks, but you can either modify those and save them as modified as additional new looks, or you can create looks from scratch. According to Townsend, looks are specific only to Color, so don't expect to swap them with colleagues who are using other color-grading applications. Not that swapping them would be all that time-consuming; according to Townsend, since a look file contains only pointers to filters, color modifications, and the like, it's only "a few K" in size.

10. Final Cut Server: Xsan integration. I asked Townhill if the new Final Cut Server had any specific Xsan integration built into it, and his answer was no - but that doesn't mean it won't play nice with Xsan, it just means that neither need any special integration to make them work well together.

11. Final Cut Server: What's where when? When I asked for whom Final Cut Server was intended, Townhill said that the range of shop sizes was quite large - and, importantly, a boutique video shop that doesn't rely on network-based storage can benefit from Final Cut Server even if the only way they pass video from one editor to another is by checking out and unplugging a FireWire drive, then handing it to the other guy, who plugs it in, checks it in, and starts working away on his Mac (or PC - Final Cut Server's clients can be cross-platform). Final Cut Server exists to keep track of everything - and when something is completed or returned to availability, Final Cut Server notices, and send emails to the team members who need to know.

12. Final Cut Server: Variable Proxies. Oh, and you know those "proxies" that Final Cut Server uses? Those low-res versions of video files that you can pass around your network quickly but will still keep all your editing info intact? Well, their quality is variable - it's your choice. You want H.264? You got it. ProRes 422? Sure. Other formats as well. And Townhill told me why Final Cut Server makes encoding into different format easy: It's got Compressor 3 built right in.

As I was getting ready to leave my conversation with Townhill, Eric Jue, Senior Product Manager of the Mac Pro, came by to say hello. We had just a brief conversation, but I did come up with a couple of tidbits. For one, the Xeon 5365 that's at the heart of the 3GHz, 8-core Mac Pro is what Intel calls an "off-the-record" processor. That is, it's not officially announced, but it's available to any Intel partner. Apple doesn't have an exclusive on that chip, they're just the only manufacturer using it. So far.

Also, Jue told me that "a lot of work" went into redesigning the "thermal solution" for the 8-core Mac to keep it "just as quiet" as the previous quad-core. He seemed quite satisfied that his team had succeeded; perhaps when Final Cut Studio ships next month, Apple will change their mind about not lending out 8-core systems for testing so we can find out how quiet it is for ourselves.